We recently suffered some absolutely devastating losses at the WECare hospital as a result of a distemper outbreak. Seven patients — who’d been admitted for a variety of other illnesses and injuries — died after contracting the virus at the hospital over the course of only a few weeks. That’s seven dogs who came to us for help and healing, who we inadvertently put in harm’s way. We’d put our hearts and souls into these cases, and of course fallen in love with them as we always do. Some were just days away from being discharged.
With only one survivor, it’s been absolutely crushing.
In an attempt to gain control of the situation, we were forced to close the hospital to new patients for a week, despite the reports of sick and injured animals continuing to flood in. The team worked tirelessly around the clock to give critical care to all affected dogs and to protect those who were seemingly unaffected. Corrective control advice from US shelters was to euthanise all patients, affected and unaffected, and wait a week or two to ensure environmental virus eradication, before starting from scratch. While this would effectively break the cycle of transmission, there was absolutely no way we could do that. Firstly, because of cultural constraints, and secondly, because it would have emotionally destroyed us to euthanise the whole hospital. I couldn’t put my staff through that.
So, we entered a tense period of ‘wait and see’, doing what we could to treat, prevent and closely monitor. If symptoms arose- even just the smallest of ear twitch- we immediately placed dogs in isolation to begin intensive nursing care.
As you can imagine, it’s been a gruelling time for the team. We’ve all lost patients we were personally attached to, and every single one of us has been left emotionally and physically exhausted.
I’m sure you all have lots of questions, so I’ve written this blog to explain a bit more about what happened, why it happened, and what we’re doing to minimise the risk of it ever happening again.
What is distemper?
Canine distemper virus (CDV) is an incredibly contagious viral infection that can affect the respiratory, gastrointestinal and neurological systems, leading to severe disease and often death. The clinical signs are wide-ranging with anything as subtle as a short-lived fever or mild occular discharge preceding often devastating respiratory or neurological signs. It can be really tricky to pick up on these signs, as they could indicate a wide range of things going on. Three days of diarrhoea in an otherwise seemingly-well puppy? The list of potential causes is as long as your arm! The characteristic signs of distemper often don’t show themselves until later in the disease process.
The mild (and early) signs can include fever, lethargy, loss of appetite, and coughing or sneezing. This can progress to eye discharge, vomiting and diarrhoea, muscle twitching, seizure, and paralysis. Dogs presenting at the later neurological stage (which we were seeing) have a more guarded prognosis — it really is a horrible way to die.
Infected animals spread the virus bodily secretions. This can be from their urine, faeces, saliva, or eye discharge. However, the main way it’s spread is through aerosol droplets that are emitted when a dog coughs, barks, or sneezes.
As an airborne virus, distemper is incredibly hard to control via any means but sanitation and vaccination (more on this below).
Once the virus has infiltrated a hospital or shelter, there’s a high risk of it affecting other unvaccinated dogs. It’s one of the most challenging infectious diseases that an organisation can face.
Thankfully, due to strong vaccination protocols in pets, distemper is now rare in the UK, but it’s becoming more and more prevalent here in Sri Lanka, which is incredibly worrying, though not really surprising given the number of dogs (one roaming dog for every 8 people) and the fact that pretty much 0% of them are vaccinated against distemper.
Why are so few vaccinated? As a charity with limited resources we’ve had to focus our vaccination efforts on rabies, which is 100% fatal. Distemper is thought to have a 50% mortality rate (though in our experience, it’s been 80% mortality). Plus, canine distemper can only be passed from dog to dogs, while rabies is a threat to all animals, including humans.
How to treat distemper in dogs
Unfortunately, there’s no cure for distemper; all we can do is provide supportive care to the patient. So, if they’re having seizures, pneumonia, or diarrhoea, we can treat those symptoms, but we cannot treat the underlying cause.
Another issue is that you never know what you’re dealing with when it comes to distemper. There really is no way to predict how far it will progress. Factors that affect the severity of symptoms include the dog’s age, immune status, and the strain of the virus.
Some dogs — like my Lottie, who contracted distemper when she was just a puppy — might be lucky enough to survive it. However, they’re often left with lingering symptoms, like muscle spasms, due to permanent neurological damage.
In fact, have you ever found yourself chuckling at an Instagram video of a cute dancing dog? Well- and sorry to be the fun police- but these dogs are actually often distemper survivors who’ve been left with lifelong rhythmic myoclonic twitching. Not so cute, huh? With this in mind, it’s worth being more aware of what you like and share on social media.
Is distemper usually fatal?
The general consensus is that there’s a 50% chance of survival for adult dogs and an even lower chance (just 20%) for puppies. However, here at WECare we’ve been seeing incredibly severe cases. Sadly, we’ve seen a 70-80% mortality rate for all dogs — as previously mentioned, we’ve had just one survivor out of eight over the course of the last few weeks.
The cases we see are often advanced to the neurological stage, which has the worst prognosis. The dogs have constant- often rhythmic- twitches, seizures, and loss of swallowing reflex. As you can imagine, this is incredibly distressing for both patient and caregiver.
Can humans catch distemper?
No, the canine distemper virus cannot infect humans.
How did the outbreak happen?
Distemper has always been in Sri Lanka, but not at the severity it is currently. Since WECare began back in 2014 we’ve seen at least one distemper case per week. However, every day for the last few months we’ve received reports of dogs with suspected distemper, from all around the island. The specialist we spoke to told us that it’s natural for distemper rates in high risk populations to wax and wane. So, it’s unsurprising to suddenly see clustering.
Despite having isolation units to house patients with contagious diseases, we became increasingly concerned about the virus entering the main hospital. So, as a precaution, we stopped admitting distemper cases. Instead, dogs were treated on the street where possible (our isolation units are few and always full!), and euthanised in the tuk tuk if they were too far gone. We just couldn’t risk bringing infected animals to the clinic. Unfortunately, due to the sheer volume of calls we were receiving about suspected distemper cases, we weren’t able to attend to every one.
So, how did the virus get in? Well, distemper is a sneaky one. Our strict admission protocol involves isolating every single new patient for 10 days on arrival. This allows us to assess them for signs of infectious disease. However, the problem is that distemper can incubate for eight to 12 weeks before a dog starts showing signs. Unfortunately, unlike rabies, a dog with distemper is contagious even before symptoms develop. Some dogs may never show clinical signs, but they can still shed the virus.
So, why is our admission isolation period only 10 days? This is a reasonable calculation based on average incubation/infectious periods across other infectious diseases, prioritising the 100% deadly ones. Like rabies.
Essentially we unwittingly admitted a dog with distemper, who didn’t start showing signs until they’d finished isolation. By this point the virus had made its way around the patient kennels, which is when disaster struck. As our patients are already immunosuppressed due to being unwell, it makes it much more likely that they’ll be affected by the virus.
What action did you take?
We immediately isolated patient zero, starting supportive care. Aware that we could have more patients incubating the virus, we tested every dog in the hospital. Unfortunately, testing proved unreliable as pretty much all of our positive patients had come back with negative results. We had dogs showing pathognomonic signs of distemper (like myoclonus twitches) who’d tested negative. As you can imagine, this confused matters somewhat.
Following testing, we vaccinated all patients against distemper and set up makeshift isolation units for every dog in the hospital (the gown and Crocs bill was biiiig!) The workload and logistics involved for the team were crazy, and we held our collective breath for the seven days it took for immunity to be achieved from the vaccination. This immunity is not guaranteed in dogs who are already incubating when vaccinated however and so, even now, we still aren’t quite out of the woods.
Of course, we also did extra deep cleans of the hospital to eradicate the virus from surfaces (disinfection can achieve 99.9%+ reduction in infectivity after a 10 minute contact time). However, we’re also lucky to live in a hot climate. The distemper virus can survive in the environment for up to 14 days in colder temperatures. Thankfully, research shows that it’s inactivated much faster in hotter environments like ours. So, while sanitation is obviously still crucial, it’s vaccination that’s most important for us.
How are the dogs at the hospital now?
It’s been nine long weeks since the outbreak began, and all dogs are now fully vaxxed. I’m hesitant to tempt fate by saying this, but we haven’t had a new case in the hospital for 28 days.
We seem to be on the home stretch, but only time will tell.
How can we reduce the risk of this happening again?
To be honest, it’s an absolute miracle that this is our first distemper outbreak in over 10 years of WECare. We vaccinate every single patient against rabies but we’ve previously only given the distemper vaccine to puppies under 12 months, WECare regulars, and our resident dogs. Why? As a charity with limited financial resources, we have to make difficult decisions when it comes to spending. The DHLP vaccine (that covers distemper, hepatitis, leptospirosis, and parvovirus) is incredibly expensive in Sri Lanka — it costs us around £10 to vaccinate each dog. In 2024, we treated 5,979 patients in total (601 of these at the hospital), which would have cost us almost £60,000 (!) in distemper vaccines. By prioritising these vaccines, we wouldn’t have had the funds to treat many of the critical cases that we’ve seen over the years. These include boar attacks, road traffic accidents, and life-threatening TVTs.
By vaccinating against something that might happen, we would have been actively choosing to deny care to sick and injured animals on our doorstep.
Vaccination is key
In a dream world, we’d have separate ventilation for every WECare patient for the entirety of their stay, and one member of staff assigned to each animal. Sadly, we don’t live in a dream world. The next best thing is to vaccinate every single dog that comes through our door. While no vaccine is infallible, the distemper vaccine is highly effective. Mass vaccination is our best chance to avoid this ever happening again.
As I’ve mentioned, this is a huge drain on our very limited funds but we currently have no choice. Distemper is more prevalent in Sri Lanka than it’s ever been — the risk is so much higher now.
Thanks to you lovely lot on social media, we now have enough money to vaccinate every hospital patient we admit for the next year. However, this isn’t enough. It’s weighing heavy on our heads that vaccination is something we’re going to have to continue forever.
Where will we find the funds? We don’t know.
How can I help?
We’re so grateful to everyone who’s already donated for vaccines, but as I’ve said, this is an ongoing issue. By setting up a monthly donation, you can help us continue to vaccinate patients long into the future.
Our next target is to raise enough money to give the DHLP vaccine to every street dog at our CNVR programme (as well as at the hospital). Vaccinating dogs within the community will significantly stop the spread of distemper in the surrounding areas. This will further reduce the risk of the virus entering the hospital again.
We’re currently neutering 5,000 dogs per year at our CNVR, but that number will increase to 12,000 by the end of this year (yup, we go hard!). So, at £10 per vaccine, we’ll need an extra £120,000 a year to start administering the jab at CNVR (you can probably understand why we’re not already doing it…). This is on top of the money needed to vaccinate all hospital patients.
It’s a lot. But it needs to be done.
We can only do this with your help.
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